


The Call of Morning And Wolves

by finnickyfox



Series: unhinged friday one-shots [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Temporary Character Death, Happy Ending, Human Alpha Stiles Stilinski, Light Angst, Love, M/M, Morning, Peter's Very Quick Character Arc From Feral Alpha to Zombiewolf, References to Persephone, Season One Canon Divergence, Seasons, Tenderness, What Is A Stiles?, hand-wavey mythology-fae choose your pick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27542062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnickyfox/pseuds/finnickyfox
Summary: A story in which Stiles' mom is and isn't Persephone and Stiles is a wolf-keeper andmore.Of course, Peter is there to make the chaos more interesting.
Relationships: Claudia Stilinski/Sheriff Stilinski, Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Stiles Stilinski & The Pack
Series: unhinged friday one-shots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2014021
Comments: 44
Kudos: 466





	The Call of Morning And Wolves

**Author's Note:**

> in my month(s) long absence, I collected a bunch of one-shots sitting in my docs. Instead of trashing them for their weirdness, why not give them a shot in their own little series? Here is the first of many to come, all promised to be a little unhinged or a little feral. I think we could all do with a little silliness in life and I thought what's more appropriate to start this off than a story inspired by seasons changing and the ways we have to sometimes go but will always return. 
> 
> it's feral, ambiguous, and about loving. enjoy the ride!

Stiles has many obsessions over the years, the desperate chase to know everything and be consumed by whatever new thing brings _excitement_ and _life_. 

His very first major obsession was Greek mythology. He bounces back to it every few years, the hyper-fixation re-igniting and expanding further into mythology. 

It all starts with Persephone. His classmates tease him when the leaves change colors and he’s the last one standing to be picked up from school. The school nurse has to call the station so his dad can come get him. Stiles’ classmates say even his mom can’t handle having a freak as a son. 

Stiles points out his mom isn’t here because she’s Persephone, duh. Everyone at school avoids him because they think it’s some type of sickness. 

In middle school, there’s a girl and she’s different. Stiles doesn’t know _how_ but he knows she’s different and Mom understands and Dad says that’s what a crush is. A crush makes sense—she’s smart and a little mean but Stiles finds her insults funny and her hair reminds him of carrots. This apparently isn’t a compliment, even when Stiles tries to explain that he loves carrots, they have a nice crunch and once he eats enough, he’ll see in the dark.

Lydia retaliates his compliment by telling everyone the tale of Persephone and now the kids do the opposite of avoiding him. They get up in his space, push him around, laughing at him for believing something so _stupid_ when really his mother hates him or is having an affair. 

Stiles doesn’t care. 

He doesn’t care if no one understands. He doesn’t care if Scott makes a confused face when Stiles tries to explain. He doesn’t care that he’ll be left waiting for hours after school and his dad is forced to come get him. He doesn’t care because the day she returns, signing him out of class mid-way through a lesson, is always his favorite day of the year.

His mom leaves every Fall and Winter and comes back in the Spring. She loves Stiles and Dad more than anything—Stiles never worries about that. He knows his mom isn’t Persephone because his father isn’t Hades and it’s more of a code-word. 

There are things that can’t be explained, like Lydia, and you have to come up with words like _crush_ to explain it. Maybe Mom’s something like Persephone, maybe it’s seasonal depression and she needs time alone to become _Mom_ again. Stiles believes both and neither; he doesn’t think much of it. Mom is Mom. She leaves and she comes back and she loves him and that’s all that matters. 

Dad understands, too, but not like Stiles does. He dreads the school call of Stiles needing to be picked up because Mom didn’t show up. His dad stares out the window as the clouds come and the sun goes down earlier and rain trickles by in short storms. He watches the seasons like maybe this year, Mom will change her mind and come home early.

Stiles thinks maybe the not-fully-understanding has something to do with Dad not getting obsessions like Stiles does—ADHD, the counselors say. There’s something _missing_ and when there’s a simple taste of joy that everyone else seems to feel naturally, you have to _chase it_. You _have to_.

Stiles wants to know what Mom chases but he also likes secrets, likes figuring the world out all by himself. He knows that when he’s older, he’ll be like Persephone, too, and the secret will be his. He thinks Dad knows this too, from the worried face he gets each time Stiles’ obsessions become shorter and shorter—never enough to satisfy his growing hunger. 

And then, the underworld takes Mom. Or something else does. Stiles feels it, collapses in the middle of P.E. and is sent to the E.R. The doctors mention seizure but Stiles looks at his dad and mouths _Mom,_ because it hurts to speak the word outside his head, and Dad understands. He takes Stiles’ hand and cries.

Kids whisper about her leaving them as Spring comes and she doesn’t. So, Dad gets a gravestone and school is like when everyone thought Persephone was an illness, too scared to go near him. Facing the kid with the dead mom they made fun of is its own disease.

And there’s also the fear in facing the split of Stiles’ soul—depression and anxiety. Scott sticks by Stiles but even he gets weird about how Stiles crumples around the edges like drying leaves.

☀ ☀ ☀

A year after his mom is stolen away, Stiles becomes Persephone. It’s summer before high school and Stiles wakes up for his morning walk feeling _different_. He loves the mornings—started off as sleep-walking into the backyard every dawn when he was a toddler. His mom laughed off his dad’s fear of it and, slowly, Dad grew used to his son walking beyond the backyard, barefoot through the streets and woods, while the sun rises. 

Stiles likes learning everything himself and so he’s not surprised that he wakes up one night and the pull in his chest has changed. He’d been waiting since the trip to the E.R. for his secret to show itself.

His dad doesn’t understand different and he hates mornings and he had a late-night shift but Stiles shakes him awake because he loves his dad like he loves his mom. Fully, intensely, too much.

“I’m going on my walk,” Stiles says in the dark of his parents' room. His dad’s room.

“Yeah, kiddo, I know,” Dad says, eyes closed. Stiles shakes him awake again. 

“Something’s _different_ ,” Stiles stresses.

There’s frozen silence, like when Stiles had to mouth a word because he couldn’t bear to speak, and then Dad’s flying out of bed. He presses money and a card with all Stiles’ information and blood type on it into his hand and gives him his cellphone—Stiles isn’t allowed to have one yet—saying Stiles can call the station or the home phone if he needs to reach him. He begs Stiles to wear shoes and Stiles puts them on, ties the laces loosely under his dad’s hawk eyes.

Stiles walks down the dark street, a few birds warming up their voices, and at the end of the block, out of sight from his house’s front doorstep, he shucks off his shoes. He thinks of shoes hanging from power lines and on an impulse, he ties his laces together and throws them up again and again until they catch, hanging down over the street like a bright red flag. 

He smiles and hopes Dad knows it means everything is okay. 

He comes home two days later and doesn’t really have words to say about what happened or why he walked miles and miles. Dad doesn’t ask, just hugs him and whispers, _thank god_. 

☀ ☀ ☀

Over the next year and a half, Beacon Hills gets decorated by more and more shoes strung up. It makes Stiles grin. He remembers each one. The odd jobs he works for gas money go right to buying new shoes instead. 

☀ ☀ ☀

When Scott’s Bit, Stiles doesn’t understand why he can’t accept that he’s a werewolf. Stiles didn’t know they existed before last night but now they’re staring right in the face of lycanthropy. Metaphorically and then literally when Scott wolfs out.

Stiles gets a little obsessed with the evolutionary advantage of losing eyebrows in a shift and why they can’t become full wolves. The glimpse he gets of the Alpha would be beautiful if it were any other beast but Stiles can feel the _wrongness_ in the wolf’s shape, that it’s unnatural and malformed. 

When the Alpha asks him if he wants the Bite, something inside Stiles rebels furiously at the idea, blood rushing in his ears after his heart freezes in the shock at the audacity, and the Alpha thinks this means he’s lying when he says no. 

But it’s the truth, he doesn’t want to be like the Alpha—not the twisted form of a beast. He knows he’s not meant for it, either, even if a part of him knows it would be so much easier. The not-different part of Stiles that wants to be accepted by his peers and to keep up with Scott’s newfound popularity.

He feels bad for the Alpha. There are moments where something dark and snarling rears its head in Stiles’ soul when Derek slams him into things or pushes him around. Stiles keeps the rage tucked away because he feels bad for Derek, too. 

He thinks of his “seizure” and the way he loves— _loves—_ his mom and his dad and Scott and even Lydia. He thinks of the way Mom loved him the same and the way his dad loves as much as possible but unable to go further and the way Scott loves even if it falls short and the way Lydia might come to love back one day. And he feels the vicious possession of never letting their love, in all its forms, go.

He thinks werewolves are different like him, minus Scott but he’s not much of a werewolf, really, to count. Stiles sees himself in the Alpha’s bloodlust, the delirious pain of love being stolen. Derek can be a dick but Stiles acknowledges that for having his sister’s love stolen from him so recently, the guy’s doing a pretty good job at keeping moving. 

So, yeah, Stiles shows up at the big fight and he _sees_ Derek and he _sees_ the Alpha and no one pays attention to him slipping out of his shoes. He’s ready to help kill the Alpha solely for hurting Lydia—unless something says otherwise. And when the Alpha turns into that ugly beast, bare feet on the ground to match Stiles, Stiles sees more clearly. 

Peter will be back. He needs a little trip under, this will be a mercy Stiles gives, and Stiles will make sure he doesn’t suffer through fire twice. 

Stiles doesn’t know _what_ he does but he knows Peter’s dead—peacefully so—before the fire hits and Derek slices his throat. Derek roars and his eyes flicker blue-red and Stiles collapses.

☀ ☀ ☀

Stiles wakes up to his mother. She laughs and cries and scolds him and talks about the strangers who’d ask for his name when the morning took him to far away places and _why do you think I let your father choose that horrid name? Because you can’t give a name you can’t pronounce!_

Stiles begs her to come back and she tells him he’s so grown now and he tells her about the werewolves and putting the Alpha under and she holds him to her chest and cries. _You’re broken_ , _my little morning._

Stiles thinks of the beast that should have been a beautiful wolf, or how it would have been a beautiful beast as it was if not for the air of twisted wrongness. He refuses to be like that, he doesn’t care if he has a war inside his body between two natures, he’ll throw shoes over power lines and he’ll gravitate back to Beacon Hills and he’ll _never_ be stolen. So what if he's broken? He’s leaving here, hand-in-hand with the morning and the red that left the Alpha’s eyes.

His mother says if he’s so special then he should add a way back to her on his list of impossibilities. Stiles sticks his tongue out at her because duh, of course, and she brushes flowers into his hair and says, _go, then,_ _wolf-keeper_.

☀ ☀ ☀

Dad cries when Stiles wakes up in the hospital bed. His heart had stopped and the doctors had called him dead and then dawn arrived and Stiles came back. There are flowers hurriedly picked out of his hair and hidden in Dad’s pockets. 

“Werewolves?” Stiles offers to his dad’s tears.

“Kid,” Dad says, “aren’t you enough already?”

Stiles sticks his tongue out and Dad grasps a hand around Stiles’ ankle in a loving squeeze. His dad won’t understand until he can physically see her, so Stiles keeps his mother a secret.

☀ ☀ ☀

Apparently, Derek still inherited the ability to Bite. Stiles has to be a part of the process, hand on the back of the soon-to-be werewolf’s neck as they’re bitten. The pups growl at Stiles calling himself _wolf-keeper_ but then he throws a pair of shoes over a power line and when he returns they growl that he can’t be a wolf-keeper if he leaves his wolves.

“But, Persephone,” Stiles says, for lack of no better way to say what they should know without him having to say.

“Wait,” Lydia—Banshee! And _his,_ too, like his wolves—says, “don’t tell me your mom really _was_ Persephone.”

Even Derek looks at him with panicked eyes and worried eyebrows.

“I’ll always come back,” Stiles answers. He'll come to the call of the morning and now to the call of his wolves.

☀ ☀ ☀

Peter says, “You took what was _mine_.”

Stiles blinks. Laughs. Laughs and laughs. 

He pats Peter’s cheek and says, “Oh, Beasty.”

He dances away from the werewolf, no longer bittered in twisted unnatural wrongness, before his neck can be torn out. The following morning of Peter’s rebirth takes Stiles for a whole week. He doesn’t think Peter’s forgiven him, not that Stiles cares for it, but he scent-marks Stiles upon his return, when the others aren’t paying attention. 

“Beasty,” Stiles says in _hello_.

“Wolf-keeper.”

Stiles tilts his head. He narrows his eyes and says, “And more.”

Peter’s lips quirk. “Wolf-keeper and more.”

Stiles grins because he's been different since before he took Peter’s red eyes away. He bumps his head into Peter’s shoulder in appreciation of someone _finally_ understanding. It’s a mock of a nuzzle that makes Peter’s lips quirk higher.

☀ ☀ ☀

The morning is the one who leads him to the Alpha pack. 

“Pity you slaughtered your pack,” Stiles says to the woman Alpha, frowning. “I don’t meet enough people who appreciate going barefoot.”

He dances out of her swiped claws and tells her, “She’s still alive, you know.”

His wolves take care of her, having felt the call of their keeper and coming in to protect. He trusts them with the rest to do with what they believe is right and goes after the leader himself.

The Demon Wolf has too much—red eyes and red eyes and red eyes warring at each other inside. 

“No wonder you’ve lost your head. I only have one alpha spark and it’s tearing me apart. I can’t kill you but I can keep you.” Stiles lights up. “Yes, I’ll keep you. I’m the wolf-keeper and you’re the door back.”

He does the thing he did to Peter, draining Deucalion of his life and red eyes. He has his wolves lay the Alpha on the Nemeton and just when his heartbeat is barely there, Stiles stops. Alpha no more. And the tree—Stiles opens the cellar and finds the place that stole his mom. He crows.

“I told you I could do it!”

☀ ☀ ☀

Stiles’ wolves do not want to keep Deucalion, Peter particularly, which is odd because Stiles thinks they’d get along nicely. 

“Wolf-keeper,” Deucalion says as Stiles brushes a hand on his shoulder.

Peter outright growls. “Wolf-keeper _and more_.”

Oh. Stiles stops. He looks into the eyes that are a much more beautiful blue than red. Deucalion had been an unnaturally twisted wolf, too, but Peter is Stiles’ first Beasty. The only Beasty whose red eyes he kept inside him.

Stiles peers into the blue eyes that fade to a softer blue and says nothing. There are things that can’t be said in words and so Stiles must wait. 

☀ ☀ ☀

The next morning that calls him comes a month later, a month of him circling closer and closer around Peter. Stiles fights the morning for a short while, like he did the first time with his dad, just long enough to find Peter. He is not a morning person and not a fan of Stiles knowing where his apartment is.

“I’m the wolf-keeper,” Stiles says, sitting on top of Peter’s legs.

Collapsed into his pillows, Peter rubs his face and sighs. “And more,” he says, voice rough with sleep. He squints up at Stiles and says, “Out with it.”

Stiles smiles because how does Peter not know already? Stiles leans down and tugs off his shoes. He unceremoniously drops them on the blanket covering Peter. 

“This blanket is cashmere.”

“You’re _my_ Beasty,” Stiles says. He promises, “I’ll be back.”

☀ ☀ ☀

Stiles’ wolves are not happy—and how did he come to have so many of them?—that Stiles comes back only for Peter to whisk him away after the briefest of puppy piling.

He’s a very happy wolf-keeper when he leaves Peter’s apartment.

He’s an even more happy wolf-keeper when he shows up to his wolves and finds that they’ve all bought him pairs of shoes.

His Beasty does not find the presents nearly as endearing.

☀ ☀ ☀

Mom pulls Stiles aside the week before his twentieth birthday. “It’s coming,” she says. “You’ve always been the morning, baby. Spring and Summer.”

_My wolves_ , Stiles mouths. He cannot step into the shoes, pun not intended, meant for him since he’d been born. He’s wrestled the power he unintentionally took that night in the woods, a curse given for a moment of kindness. 

His born secret has neighbored the wolf-power begrudgingly but it is only a fledgling secret, in a week it will be of age and unlock its full potential. Not just mornings or a few days or a week—entire months. Time a keeper cannot be away from his wolves.

“This is supposed to be a celebration,” Mom says, tears gathering. 

☀ ☀ ☀ 

Stiles dances with Peter in the kitchen, his bare feet on top of Peter’s as Peter takes his weight easily and leads him in a slow dance. Peter has a record player, one from before the fire, and it croons while the oven preheats and they act silly in love.

“How do you feel about being a Beasty and more?” Stiles asks. His birthday is tomorrow. The two natures inside him are at war again. 

“Will I be able to come with you?”

“You’ll be bound to me.”

Peter’s chest rumbles with pleasure and Stiles laughs. If the red he stole that night in the woods could show outwardly, Stiles knows his eyes would be flashing. “Do you want the bite?”

Peter’s eyes flash blue. He smiles with sharp teeth. “I thought you’d never ask.”

☀ ☀ ☀ 

Peter refuses to partake in the tradition but he submits to doing so once, relinquishing one shoe to be tied with one of Stiles’ shoes. He chooses where to hang it, a declaration of their first.

Above anything they belong to and belongs between them, they belong to each other.

Peter throws their joined shoes over a tree branch in the woods and he leads them toward the break of sunlight, Spring and Summer happy to have two of them that they are willing to still keep their visits short.

☀ ☀ ☀ 

Stiles figured out the secret, and it turns out there are two. One about him, and one about wolves.

Two secrets are too big for one being but shared with another, it can be managed. 

Stiles is wolf-keeper and _less_ but it’s okay because Peter is less Beasty and _more_ which means they lost nothing in the end, because they are each other. Always will be, no matter the way natures change.

Broken and love, hand-in-hand.

**Author's Note:**

> I did mention ambiguous and unhinged right? What is a Stiles? Something like love and loyalty glued together. This one-shot is more Stiles centered, obviously, but fear not there is lots of steter to come (and maybe stetopher and stargent and stiles brotps). 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! If you have the energy, please leave a comment about if there's interest in more unhinged one-shots! I hope everyone had a good Friday the 13th <3 I'm on Pacific Standard Time so I guess these might be Saturday one-shots for some of you and in that case I hope you have a lovely Saturday :)
> 
> you can find me on my tumblr here @ [transtilinski](https://transtilinski.tumblr.com/) <3


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